United Nations Sending Millions To Corrupt Countries In The Name Of Green Energy

An initiative by the United Nations meant to promote green energy has been plagued with inefficiency and rampant funding of programs through corrupt governments.

The Green Energy Climate Fund had ambitious goals when it was launched by the United Nations in 2010. Based in Songdo, South Korea, and employing 250 people, the organization’s mission is to boost renewable energy development in third-world countries with money donated from richer countries.

Former President Barack Obama was a major supporter of the initiative and pledged $3 billion of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

The Obama administration was only able to donate $1 billion before President Donald Trump entered office. Unfortunately for the GCF, the Republican president was not a fan of the program. In his 2017 decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, Trump also indicated he would not be donating the remaining $2 billion.

While his decision was widely derided by environmentalists and other progressive groups, not everyone agreed the GCF was worth investing in.

“This is a welcome development, given the endemic corruption in the countries and organizations on the receiving end of GCF dollars,” Ross Marchand, the director of policy at Taxpayer Protection Alliance, said in a statement to The Daily Caller News Foundation. The Taxpayer Protection Alliance, which monitors wasteful spending by the U.S. government, has been critical of the GCF’s handling of money.

“How can we trust, for instance, that the $5 million given by the GCF to the Tajikistan government will be allocated wisely, given the country’s abysmal corruption rankings? Given the exposure of ‘anti-corruption’ officials in that country as corrupt themselves, there is absolutely zero accountability for dispersed U.S. dollars,” Marchand continued.

In the eight years since it began, the GCF has committed around $4 billion to more than 75 projects around the world. However, a number of its investments have struggled to implement their intended goals, exemplifying the realities that come with doing business in impoverished, dysfunctional countries.

For example, a $30-million solar project in Zambia has been delayed repeatedly. Engineers for the project cite the government’s inability to provide basic information as a reason for the continued setbacks.

Hope for better renewable energy development in the African country appeared less likely after members of Zambia’s Industrial Development Corporation were revealed to have falsified legal documents and involved in worldwide, criminal activity.

Vietnam — a nation that is ranked 107th out of 180 in Transparency International’s index of corrupt countries — is also a recipient of GCF investment.

The Southeast Asian country received $80 million in funding, along with another $100 million from the World Bank.

A government executive in Vietnam’s energy industry was sentenced in January to life in jail for embezzlement and corruption — giving the international community reason to worry about its investments.

“American taxpayers deserve better than having their hard-earned dollars redistributed to strongmen in their cronies in the name of ‘sustainability,’” stated Marchand.

SOURCE 





Burning clothes is not just snobby, it’s a flaming obscenity

RACHEL JOHNSON slams labels for torching expensive gear to stop it going to the 'wrong people'

I was really repulsed by the revelation that Burberry (and other ‘elite’ labels) put to the torch tens of millions of pounds of expensive, perfect, box-fresh gear a year simply to stop it being snapped up by the ‘wrong people’.

They hope to stop these high-end goods ending up in discount stores or on eBay, thereby making it easier to sell new-season stock for top whack on the grounds of its premium, scarcity value.

How snobby is that? It really was a shocker. This fire sale of new expensive schmutter when so many people all over the world don’t have fresh water, sanitation, a shirt on their back… It was almost as awful as shops and restaurants all over the UK binning masses of edible, nutritious food while millions of people are hungry and so many children go to school without breakfast.

Back to Burberry burning its own brand. This isn’t just another fashion fail from the company, remember, that almost ate itself with anxiety about a so-called ‘chav’ hijack of its iconic, British, deluxe, elite etc identity (as it describes itself on its website) when one, funny picture of former EastEnder Danniella Westbrook clad in a Burberry check kilt, with matching bag, toddler, and buggy went viral 16 years ago.

This is possibly the ugliest example of capitalism I have encountered in my life, and confirmation that we’ve hit peak over-consumption and peak disposable fashion at once. It’s verging on the criminal. Enough.

Yes, I know the three-trillion-dollar clothing industry employs millions of people and is the bedrock of the economy in many Third World countries. And I know that the fashion industry contributes almost £30billion to the UK economy.

But these healthy numbers hide how wasteful and damaging our addiction to clothes is. Fast fashion is cheap – Primark jeans for pocket money all round – but it costs the earth. The industry’s environmental footprint is beyond immense.

We binned billions of pounds of clothes last year (many of them mine), filling many acres of landfill (I promise I try to think of this every time I pop into Zara). Creating textiles consumes untold millions of resources and requires 93 billion cubic metres of precious water a year, and the greenhouse gas emissions belched out are more than those of all international flights and maritime shipping put together.

Even if Burberry says it turns last season’s belted trenches to ash in ‘specialist incinerators able to harness the energy from the process’, I so don’t care. This is not on trend.

What is, is upcycling. It is four-minute showers and feeding your wedding guests food destined for landfill, as one happy couple did last week (I admit I was disappointed they hadn’t actually scraped the grub out of dumpsters).

It’s charities such as The Felix Project, collecting delicious food that would otherwise go to waste to distribute it in paper bags to thousands in need. It’s wearing the same outfit twice (the Duchess of Cambridge), or even 20 times or more (Princess Anne).

It is outrageous that the industry destroys valuable stuff that other people have worked all hours to produce (often in China) at no small cost to the environment, stuff that so many people actually need as well as merely want.

Stay classy, Burberry – and this means putting the planet rather than your brand first. There really is only one of those.

SOURCE 






Luddite eco-imperialists claim to be virtuous

Uber-organic campaign enshrines primitive agriculture and malnutrition as human rights

Paul Driessen and David Wojick

Not every poor person in impoverished places around the world aspires to the modern living standards they see and hear about: indoor plumbing, electricity for lights, a refrigerator and stove, a paucity of disease-carrying insects, top-notch schools and hospitals, their children living past age five. But many do.

Not every poor African, Asian or Latin American farmer wants to give up his backbreaking, dawn to dusk traditional agricultural practices, guiding his ox and plow, laying down meager supplies of manure to fertilize crops, surviving droughts, repeatedly hand spraying pesticides to battle ravenous insects – to reap harvests that often barely feed his family, much less leave produce to sell locally. But many do.

Unfortunately, they often face formidable foes. An absence of electricity, roads and other infrastructure. Corrupt, kleptocratic governments. Nonexistent property rights and other collateral to secure loans. Powerful, well-financed eco-imperialists whose policies perpetuate poverty, malnutrition and disease.

Banks and other carbon colonialists glorify limited wind and solar energy for poor villages, while denying financial support for fossil fuel electricity generation. Anti-chemical fanatics promote bed nets and narrowly defined “integrated pest management,” but bitterly oppose chemical pesticides and the spatial repellant DDT to kill mosquitoes, keep them out of homes and prevent deadly malaria.

Radical organic food groups battle any use of genetically engineered crops that multiply crop yields, survive droughts and slash pesticide spraying by 75% or more. They even vilify Golden Rice, which enables malnourished children to avoid Vitamin A Deficiency, blindness and death.

Now poor country families face even harder struggles, as a coalition of well-financed malcontents, agitators and pressure groups once again proves the adage that power politics makes strange bedfellows. Coalition members share a deep distaste for fossil fuels, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, corporations, capitalism, biotechnology, and virtually all aspects of modern agriculture.

Their growing social-political movement is called “AgroEcology.” While the concept is studiously vague, it essentially asserts that indigenous, traditional farmers must be shielded from market forces and modern technologies, so that they can continue using ancient, primitive, “culturally appropriate” methods.

AgroEcology is anti-GMO organic food activism on steroids. It rejects virtually everything that has enabled modern agriculture to feed billions more people from less and less acreage and, given the chance, could eliminate hunger and malnutrition worldwide. It is rabidly opposed to biotechnology, monoculture farming, non-organic fertilizers and chemical insecticides – and even despises mechanized equipment like tractors, and the hybrid seeds and other advances developed by Dr. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution.

AgroEcology advocates tortured but clever concepts like “food sovereignty” and the “right to subsistence farming by indigenous people.” It promotes “indigenous agricultural knowledge and practices,” thus excluding the vast storehouse of non-indigenous learning, practices and technologies that were developed in recent centuries – and are readily available to anyone with access to a library or internet connection.

Or as they put it: “Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations.” Food sovereignty also “focuses on production and harvesting methods that maximize the contribution of ecosystems, avoid costly and toxic inputs, and improve the resiliency of local food systems in the face of climate change.” (The 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni, the first global forum on food sovereignty. In Mali!)

Some adherents even seek the “re-peasantization” of Latin American society!

AgroEcology has the financial backing of far-left foundations like the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which collectively have committed more than $500 million to a raft of like-minded NGOs.

Its precepts and policies are approved and actively promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank and other UN agencies at their taxpayer-funded international conferences. These agencies are even beginning to demand adherence to über-organic practices as a condition for receiving taxpayer funding for agricultural development programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America. (But taxpayers and legislators who provide the funding have been permitted little substantive input on any of this.)

It’s all justified – and often accepted without question in government agencies and universities – by reference to the politically correct, virtue-signaling terminology of our era: sustainability, sustainable farming, dangerous manmade climate change, social justice, indigenous rights, self-determination.

Also typical, anyone opposing these ideologies, policies and demands is vilified as a “willful supporter” of violence against women, “land-grabbing” by multinational corporations, peasant farmer suicides, “mass expropriation and genocide” of indigenous people, and crimes against humanity.

Imagine how intolerant AgroEcology ideologues would react if a farmer wanted to assert his or her food sovereignty and self-determination – by planting hybrid corn, using modern synthetic fertilizers or (heaven forbid) planting Bt corn (maize), to get higher yields, spend less time in the field, spray fewer pesticides, or improve the family’s living standards by selling surplus crops. And yet many want to do exactly that.

“By planting the new Bt cotton on my six hectares [15 acres], I was able to build a house and give it a solar panel,” Bethuel Gumede told the late Roy Innis, then chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, during a trip to South Africa. “I also bought a TV and fridge. My wife can buy healthy food, and we can afford to send the kids to school. My life has changed completely.”

“I grow maize on a half hectare,” Elizabeth Ajele told him. “The old plants would be destroyed by insects, but not the new biotech plants. With the profits I get from the new Bt maize, I can grow onions, spinach and tomatoes, and sell them for extra money to buy fertilizer. We were struggling to keep hunger out of our house. Now the future looks good.”

Equally relevant, how can agricultural practices that barely sustained families and villages before the advent of modern agriculture possibly feed the world? As Dr. Borlaug said in 2006: “Our planet has 6.5 billion people. If we use only organic fertilizers and methods on existing farmland, we can only feed 4 billion. I don’t see 2.5 billion people volunteering to disappear.”

AgroEcology promoters like Greenpeace, Food & Water Watch, Pesticide Action Network, Union of Concerned scientists and La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way) pay little attention to any of this. They’re too busy “saving people” from “dangerous” hybrid seeds, GMOs, agribusiness, farm machinery and chemicals. Not that any of them would ever want to toil on any of the primitive farms they extol.

Greenpeace frightens Africans by claiming “some researchers think DDT and DDE could be inhibiting lactation” in nursing mothers. So families are afraid to use DDT, and millions die from preventable malaria, while still more millions suffer permanent brain or liver damage from the disease. Would it also oppose cancer-curing chemotherapy because it causes hair loss and reduced resistance to infections?

Modern instruments can detect chemicals in mere parts per billion (the equivalent of a few seconds in 32 years) or even parts per trillion (a few seconds in 32,000 years). That’s hardly a threat to human health.

But Luddite eco-imperialists and über-organic food activists stridently oppose any manmade fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, while saying “natural” pesticides commonly used by organic farmers are safe. In reality, copper sulfate can kill humans in lower doses per kilogram of body weight than aspirin, and exposure to rotenone causes Parkinson's Disease-like symptoms in rats and can also kill humans.

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, US and EU government agencies, and real human rights advocates should challenge and denounce AgroEcology agitators and their financial enablers for advancing fraudulent claims that perpetuate malnutrition, poverty and human rights abuses in the world’s poorest countries. They should also cut off funding to any government agencies that support AgroEcology nonsense.

Via email





Are Record Temperatures Evidence of Manmade Global Warming?

It is a slam-dunk certainty that American mainstream media will seize upon a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, “Southern California sets all-time heat records amid broiling conditions,” as justification for its continuing support of the contested theory of man-caused global warming. It has already happened with a Yahoo News story claiming that the new temperature records world-wide prove man causes climate change.

But there are problems in pursuing that path.

First, days that reach and exceed 117-degree temperatures have been known to happen for a very long time in the interior basin of southern California, sometimes referred to as “Death Valley” (though not to be confused with the literal Death Valley). There, temperatures rise above 120 degrees regularly nearly every summer.

The United States’ official all-time record high of 134 degrees F was set July 10, 1913, in California’s real Death Valley. A meteorologist quoted in the L.A. Times article intimates that is where the recent hot air originated, having been pushed westward (advected) over into the Los Angeles basin from an area of strong high pressure (anticyclone) centered farther inland.

Second, by 2018 (into the 21st century) a burgeoning urban heat island (one that now encompasses Los Angeles City proper, Los Angeles County, and the surrounding suburbs) has grown enough to produce excessively high temperatures to a much greater extent today than in past decades, when the population of California was much smaller.

The Los Angeles urban heat island adds more than four degrees to the daily maximum temperature over and above what it had been when earlier records were set in the 1950s. It was in the nature of things and about time for meteorological conditions to force upward a statistical departure from the accustomed, already hot and dry conditions Angelinos experience every passing summer. Weather records are made to be broken.

Third, a similar outbreak of record high temperatures (during several iconic record-setting heat waves of the past) persisted for weeks across the Upper Midwest and into the Atlantic states some eight decades ago during the 1930s (Dust Bowl). Extreme heat and drought happened in 1934 and again in 1936.

Our Midwestern and Great Plains forebears, who suffered greatly through the Depression years, also suffered through many summers when the daytime temperatures exceeded 100 degrees F and night-time temperatures remained in and above the mid-80s. In July 1936 the City of La Crosse, WI, experienced ten consecutive days when the maximum temperature reached or exceeded 100 degrees. On July 14 of that year, it was 108 in La Crosse, its all-time record. On that same date, the thermometer in Wisconsin Dells topped out at 114, the state’s all-time record high.

Record high temperatures happen, somewhere—in fact, in many somewheres—every day here and there around the world. So do record lows. They’re weather phenomena, not evidence of long-term climate change.

So take a seat Los Angeles, and join the club. Your turn came. Other places have had their turns. Still others will have them in the future. Most will have them repeatedly over centuries. Get used to it. It’s weather, not cli

SOURCE 




Summer Causes Climate Change Hysteria

by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

Summers in the U.S. are hot. They always have been. Some are hotter than others.

Speaking as a PhD meteorologist with 40 years experience, this week’s heat wave is nothing special.

But judging from the memo released on June 22 by Public Citizen (a $17 million per year liberal/progressive consumer rights advocacy group originally formed by Ralph Nader in 1971 and heavily funded by Leftwing billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations), every heat wave must now be viewed as a reminder of human-caused climate change. The memo opines that (believe it or not) the news media have not been very good about linking weather events to climate change, which is leading to complacency among the public.

The June 22 memo focus was on the excessive heat in New York state, so let’s begin our journey down Hysteria Lane there. The official NOAA average maximum temperatures for every June since 1895 in New York looks like this:

The long term trend is not statistically different from zero. June 2018 is not yet available at the NOAA website, but from what I’ve seen for the global June Climate Forecast System map at WeatherBell.com, it looks like it was near the long-term (20th Century) average.

The memo also made mention of the widespread record warmth the U.S. experienced in May, 2018. New York had it’s 7th warmest May on record this year, and the long-term linear warming trend there since 1895 is weak (0.22 F/decade) and not statistically different from zero at the 95% confidence level. The May warmth in the U.S. was regional, as expected for weather variations, with much of Canada being exceedingly cold:

When do you suppose the hottest temperature ever recorded in New York was? Clearly, with global warming, it must be in the last 20 or 30 years, right?

Wrong. It was 109 deg. F. on July 22, 1926 in Troy, New York. In contrast, the state record for the coldest temperature was much more recent: -52 deg. F on Feb 18, 1979, at Old Forge, New York.

What about this week’s heat wave? Let’s look at NOAA’s GFS forecast model 5-day average temperatures for this week (Monday through Friday, July 2-6, 2018, graphic from WeatherBell.com):

As you can see, the excessive heat is (again) regionally isolated, which is exactly what we expect for weather… not for climate change. See those colder than average areas? Why aren’t those being blamed on climate change, too? They look like they approximately cancel out the warm area over the Northeast U.S., which is often the case for weather (not climate change) variations.

That was a 5-day forecast for this week. Next let’s look at what was actually observed over the last couple days (July 1-2), which were very hot in the Great Lakes and Northeast:

What we see is that there were unseasonably cool temperatures in the western U.S., again an indication of a temporary and localized weather pattern… not “global warming”, which would be warm everywhere.

How about extreme high temperatures in the U.S in general? Here are the yearly total number of days above 100 and 105 deg. F, again for the years 1895 through 2017, based upon official NOAA data:

We see no trend in the number of days with excessive heat.

So, what do we make of the claims in the Public Citizen memo? Well, they mention that we have seen 1.1 deg. C of warming since the Industrial Revolution. Think about that. Less than 2 deg. F warming in about 200 years, part of which is likely to be natural, based upon temperature proxy estimates over the last 2,000 years for the Northern Hemisphere:

Am I claiming that there is no such thing as human-caused warming? No. I’m claiming that it is overblown. The Public Citizen memo makes much of recent record warm years clustering together, which sounds alarming — if one doesn’t mention the small fractions of a degree involved. If there was no natural year-to-year variability, and the temperature was increasing at 0.01 or 0.02 deg. F every year, then every successive year would be a record warm year…but who would care? The rate of ‘global warming’ is too weak for any one person to notice in their lifetime.

Furthermore, we already know the climate models (which are the basis for proposed changes in energy policy to get us away from fossil fuels) are producing generally twice as much warming of the atmosphere-ocean system as has been observed. The most recent energy budget analysis of surface and deep-ocean warming suggests that the climate system is only half as sensitive to our CO2 emissions as you are being told…. maybe 1.5 deg. C of eventual warming from a doubling of atmospheric CO2. At 410 ppm, We are currently half way to doubling.

And even THAT reduced estimate of future warming assumes ALL of the warming is human-caused! If a portion of recent warming is natural, the less the human-caused global warming problem becomes.

Finally, the Public Citizen memo claims that today’s technology would already allow 80% to 100% of our energy to come from renewable sources. This is patently false. Solar and wind are relatively diffuse (and thus expensive) sources of energy which are intermittent, requiring fossil fuel (or nuclear) backup. It would be exceedingly expensive to get even 50% of our energy from such sources. Maybe someday we will have such technologies, but until that day arrives, the massive amount of money that would be required to achieve such a goal would worsen poverty, which historically has been the leading cause of premature death in the world.

SOURCE. (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
 
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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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